Google Ads optimisation score

Google Ads a new "Optimisation score" column has appeared in the user interface over the past year. This is the status of Google's processing of its own suggestions. As a medium, Google wants to show its advertising to the widest possible audience and is trying to find ways to make it more effective or more visible. Each recommendation is given a weight, e.g. 20%.

If such a recommendation with a weight of 20% appears in the ad manager, the optimization score will drop and will then be 80%. If you reject the recommendation, the score goes back up to 100%. Great - the optimization score is 100%!!! Wonderful - perfectly optimized advertising!

In practice, therefore, the optimisation score does not tell you anything about the quality of the advertising, but only whether the recommendations have been a) rejected or b) accepted.

The optimisation score is not a measure of the quality of the advertising that has been done, but of how Google handles the suggestions. Unfortunately, from a professional's point of view, the vast majority of recommendations have to be rejected, which makes them less interesting to deal with. It is unnecessary work to deal with them and the benefits to the client are not increased.

Quality of recommendations

Some of the recommendations are useful, while others are useless. If advertising is well designed, linked to analytics and driven by results, the worst that can happen is that the recommendations adopted can be harmful and undermine advertising results. Recommendations do not in any way assess the specific business needs of the company or the background to the choices and decisions made in advertising.

For example, keyword suggestions should be treated with great caution. Google's recommendations are based on the fact that it sniffs out relevant terms that are used in searches. If the keyword research is done well and the campaign optimisation is of high quality, the recommendations are usually of no use.

It is worth remembering that when the media make recommendations, they are trying to maximise the money they spend.

Who are the recommendations for?

A significant number of the recommendations are aimed at advertisers who are not deeply familiar with the Google advertising to do. It aims to guide the advertiser to adopt a more effective approach to the display and
click bid automation, as well as all the latest features related to Google Ads.

Automation of measures

Automation can ensure that ads are displayed even when they are not being actively maintained. For automation to go as far as delivering benefits, it would require huge amounts of data to enable the automation to make the right choices. Very few sites or advertisers have access to such amounts of data.

The learning process should be based on well-planned advertising to get the learning started in the right direction. In practice, the current automation settings only ensure that ads are displayed and that the cheapest possible clicks or high click rates are achieved, without taking a view on quality. Tuning the Ladas into a Formula 1 car does not turn it into a Formula 1 car.

New features in Google Ads

New features can be useful, but only if you know how to use them properly. Buying the best racing car in the world does not make you the best racer in the world.

Example: When Google ads text ads introduced the option of three headline texts and a larger amount of ad text, professionals quickly realised that in some cases a large amount of text
may work less well than short and concise ads copy. On the other hand, ad copy content and structure also became more important. The differences between well and poorly designed ad copy increased.

Introducing a new feature does not mean better advertising, or better results.

Abuse of optimisation points in sales

You get what you measure, there's a pretty good saying here too. If a Google ad salesperson is using Google ads optimisation scores to make their argument, they are trying to pull the wool over your eyes, or they don't know what they're talking about. Optimisation scores don't tell you anything about the benefits of advertising.

Technical audits of advertising can be questioned, as Google advertising is only a very narrow slice of digital marketing and technical implementation is a very small part of Google advertising. The audits are therefore mainly sales tools, aimed at finding easily understandable but irrelevant details.

Instead of technical gimmicks, it would be smarter to focus on developing the business case and approach the details through them, rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae.